The Atheist's God will only let you into Heaven if you don't believe in Him. Simple disbelief is atheism, not agnosticism.
The agnostic's claim is pretty strong. Why would it be impossible to know whether there is a God? What reasons are there to believe that it is impossible? (The only one I can think of is that "God" is so poorly defined that the question of existence is meaningless until the definition has been straightened out first. But I haven't seen an agnostic actually make that argument.)
At this point, a link to Battleground God might be fun. It has some flaws, but finding them is part of the fun.
I don't have to explain anything via religion or psychology, because God actually went an revealed himself to me. Burning bush and everything. Then he said, "Son," he said, "I'm getting really fed up with all these people believing in me without a shred of evidence. I created them better than that. I'm really disappointed. And I can't stand yes-men. So I'm not going to let anyone who believes in me into Heaven. Spread the word, please."
So I said, "Sure thing, I'll post it on slashdot. But, um, since you went and revealed yourself to me, I get to be an exception, right? Because I have proof now, you see? So I figure it's okay if I believe in you."
He didn't answer, but I know that he meant to agree. I ask him again every day, just to be sure. I still have faith.
I think your spin example is unlikely. The RIAA acknowledging the economic power of grassroots movements? I doubt that. I think that a more likely spin is that they will use the volume of sales as a factor in their "piracy" calculations, for example by assuming that it was copied X times for every copy sold. Millions and millions of damages...
In this case, we would be arguing for this patent, because it will stifle the use of what it patents, thereby holding back progress and whatnot in a field where we don't want to see progress.
In other words, we're promoting this patent as a device to hold back innovation:) I'd like to see a
patent lawyer agree with that one.
Many of these tablets are damaged, or broken into several parts which you would have to hunt down and combine to see the whole story. Also, cuneiform writers tended not to care much about rules of typography (which hadn't been invented yet:), so they considered it no big deal if long sentences wrapped around the edges of a tablet.
In addition, there are clues in the manner of writing (care, proficiency, emphasis) that may help when interpreting a text, for example to identify mistakes in the original, or to decide whether it's an original composition or a student copying from a reference work. Sometimes you need clues just to tell where the word boundaries are.
For such things, I expect that the actual tablet would be far more helpful than a picture of the text (let alone a transcription).
FWIW, I'm not an archaeologist, I just read the books.
The Itanium isn't really a "faster chip". If you count clock cycles, it's actually slower than the mainstream. It gets its speed from better instruction scheduling, so that each clock cycle does more work. The architecture provides for this in several ways:
The processor can assume that a sequence of instructions can all be executed simultaneously, unless it is told otherwise. This passes the burden of figuring this out from the processor (which has to do it on every run) to the compiler (which will have to do it only at compile time, and has a lot more information to work with too).
The architecture is designed so that conditional jumps are needed less often. Conditional jumps interfere with efficient instruction scheduling by making it harder to predict which instructions should be executed next, so reducing the need for them is a good thing.
There are lots of general-purpose registers, which means that fewer instructions are wasted on just shuffling data between the registers and main memory. This is an old trick, but the x86 architecture is even older... when I look at a compiled x86 program, about half of the instructions seem to be that kind of data shuffling. What makes it worse is that main memory is significantly slower than the processor.
Note that the first point creates a problem mentioned in the article: it relies on the compiler to determine which instructions can be executed together. It is difficult for a compiler
to take full advantage of this, particularly when compiling C code. It's an interesting area for experimentation, though.
The examples he gives for usage of null pointers are both wrong. When a null pointer (whether written as 0 or NULL) is passed to a varargs function, it should be cast to a pointer of the appropriate type. See the comp.lang.c faq for details. The relevant questions are 5.4 and 5.6. But feel free to read them all!
I took a look at thequarterly and yearly statements on their Investor Information pages.
Their entire expense over the previous year consisted of $32400 in administration fees
(which I think is rather a lot), and nothing else. No R&D at all. All the development is apparently being done by their parent company (Borealis Technical), and the entire share capital of Cool Chips is lent to Borealis Technical, with no interest rate and no terms for paying it back.
It looks like investing in Cool Chips will get you a piece of this loan, not a piece of the technology. I suspect that this is exactly why the company was set up. I also note that if Cool Chips folds, then Borealis Technical will be free of the exclusive licensing agreement, and it will still have all the money and the technology.
Of course, none of this is conclusive. I just wouldn't invest in this company.
3. There was a naturally occurring nuclear reactor in Africa where a deposit of Uranium moderated by spring water fissioned all of the U235 out of the ore. As far as anyone can tell the long term results of this reactor on the local biology were zilch.
... except, perhaps, for mutating a couple of monkeys into superintelligent hairless freaks, which were then chased out of their trees by the monkey anti-mutant leage:-)
The whole point is that the site is not dangerous, unless you dig into it. Then it becomes very dangerous, since large amounts of poisonous radioactive material become exposed to erosion and get into the ecosystem.
So by the time people start dying, it's already too late to avoid the site. Instead, there will have to be a project to seal it up again.
Remember the Curse of King Tut? It went something like, "If you enter here, you will be cursed. You will be doomed to ill fortune. You will wither away and die before your time. Do not enter!". The message is remarkably close to a nuclear waste warning, especially if translated by a culture that does not know about radioactivity.
And, of course, the practical effect was to attract archaeologists:) However, that tomb did stand undisturbed for thousands of years, so maybe the basic approach is sound.
On the other hand, nothing stops them from inserting commercials between the "parts" of a "miniseries".
That used to annoy me, back when I still watched TV.
We just have to be able to read them. Then we can copy the bits, encrypted or not, to a different disk. As long as we can make a device that makes an identical copy, we'll be fine.
Of course, it's going to be easier to just not buy the things in the first place:) I still don't have a DVD player, because of my initial disgust at the region coding thing.
At first I was cynically amused that none of the women on the front page of that site were topless -- obviously a case of American standards prevailing.
But then I realized: of course... they're on page three.
Slashdot Mirror
By the same logic that creates this "right to rent" (i.e. the EULA), this right is non-transferable.
The Atheist's God will only let you into Heaven if you don't believe in Him. Simple disbelief is atheism, not agnosticism.
The agnostic's claim is pretty strong. Why would it be impossible to know whether there is a God? What reasons are there to believe that it is impossible? (The only one I can think of is that "God" is so poorly defined that the question of existence is meaningless until the definition has been straightened out first. But I haven't seen an agnostic actually make that argument.)
At this point, a link to Battleground God might be fun. It has some flaws, but finding them is part of the fun.
I don't have to explain anything via religion or psychology, because God actually went an revealed himself to me. Burning bush and everything. Then he said, "Son," he said, "I'm getting really fed up with all these people believing in me without a shred of evidence. I created them better than that. I'm really disappointed. And I can't stand yes-men. So I'm not going to let anyone who believes in me into Heaven. Spread the word, please."
So I said, "Sure thing, I'll post it on slashdot. But, um, since you went and revealed yourself to me, I get to be an exception, right? Because I have proof now, you see? So I figure it's okay if I believe in you."
He didn't answer, but I know that he meant to agree. I ask him again every day, just to be sure. I still have faith.
I think your spin example is unlikely. The RIAA acknowledging the economic power of grassroots movements? I doubt that. I think that a more likely spin is that they will use the volume of sales as a factor in their "piracy" calculations, for example by assuming that it was copied X times for every copy sold. Millions and millions of damages...
Is it possible for dead musicians to tour?
It sure seems like it sometimes.
In this case, we would be arguing for this patent, because it will stifle the use of what it patents, thereby holding back progress and whatnot in a field where we don't want to see progress.
In other words, we're promoting this patent as a device to hold back innovation :) I'd like to see a
patent lawyer agree with that one.
On top of that, if you had source, would you be able to find instantly exploitable backdoors that would give you full root?
For programs that haven't been previously audited, "grep strcpy" tends to find those. (This is from practical experience.)
Many of these tablets are damaged, or broken into several parts which you would have to hunt down and combine to see the whole story. Also, cuneiform writers tended not to care much about rules of typography (which hadn't been invented yet :), so they considered it no big deal if long sentences wrapped around the edges of a tablet.
In addition, there are clues in the manner of writing (care, proficiency, emphasis) that may help when interpreting a text, for example to identify mistakes in the original, or to decide whether it's an original composition or a student copying from a reference work. Sometimes you need clues just to tell where the word boundaries are.
For such things, I expect that the actual tablet would be far more helpful than a picture of the text (let alone a transcription).
FWIW, I'm not an archaeologist, I just read the books.
You don't use Dvorak much, do you?
It has a cooler acronym than CBPTBwhatever :-)
The Itanium isn't really a "faster chip". If you count clock cycles, it's actually slower than the mainstream. It gets its speed from better instruction scheduling, so that each clock cycle does more work. The architecture provides for this in several ways:
- The processor can assume that a sequence of instructions can all be executed simultaneously, unless it is told otherwise. This passes the burden of figuring this out from the processor (which has to do it on every run) to the compiler (which will have to do it only at compile time, and has a lot more information to work with too).
- The architecture is designed so that conditional jumps are needed less often. Conditional jumps interfere with efficient instruction scheduling by making it harder to predict which instructions should be executed next, so reducing the need for them is a good thing.
- There are lots of general-purpose registers, which means that fewer instructions are wasted on just shuffling data between the registers and main memory. This is an old trick, but the x86 architecture is even older... when I look at a compiled x86 program, about half of the instructions seem to be that kind of data shuffling. What makes it worse is that main memory is significantly slower than the processor.
Note that the first point creates a problem mentioned in the article: it relies on the compiler to determine which instructions can be executed together. It is difficult for a compiler to take full advantage of this, particularly when compiling C code. It's an interesting area for experimentation, though.Let me get this straight... if you get spammed at a myrealbox.com address, you owe them $10 per spam? I'd go broke in a few days that way.
(It may not be what they mean, but it's what it says. I hate non-negotiated contracts.)
The examples he gives for usage of null pointers are both wrong. When a null pointer (whether written as 0 or NULL) is passed to a varargs function, it should be cast to a pointer of the appropriate type. See the comp.lang.c faq for details. The relevant questions are 5.4 and 5.6. But feel free to read them all!
I took a look at thequarterly and yearly statements on their Investor Information pages. Their entire expense over the previous year consisted of $32400 in administration fees (which I think is rather a lot), and nothing else. No R&D at all. All the development is apparently being done by their parent company (Borealis Technical), and the entire share capital of Cool Chips is lent to Borealis Technical, with no interest rate and no terms for paying it back.
It looks like investing in Cool Chips will get you a piece of this loan, not a piece of the technology. I suspect that this is exactly why the company was set up. I also note that if Cool Chips folds, then Borealis Technical will be free of the exclusive licensing agreement, and it will still have all the money and the technology.
Of course, none of this is conclusive. I just wouldn't invest in this company.
The whole point is that the site is not dangerous, unless you dig into it. Then it becomes very dangerous, since large amounts of poisonous radioactive material become exposed to erosion and get into the ecosystem.
So by the time people start dying, it's already too late to avoid the site. Instead, there will have to be a project to seal it up again.
Remember the Curse of King Tut? It went something like, "If you enter here, you will be cursed. You will be doomed to ill fortune. You will wither away and die before your time. Do not enter!". The message is remarkably close to a nuclear waste warning, especially if translated by a culture that does not know about radioactivity.
And, of course, the practical effect was to attract archaeologists :) However, that tomb did stand undisturbed for thousands of years, so maybe the basic approach is sound.
In that case it wouldn't be horror... just cause for more celebration!
... then does that mean that copyright does not apply? I don't see how you can have it both ways.
On the other hand, nothing stops them from inserting commercials between the "parts" of a "miniseries". That used to annoy me, back when I still watched TV.
Get a rear-view mirror for your monitor :-)
We just have to be able to read them. Then we can copy the bits, encrypted or not, to a different disk. As long as we can make a device that makes an identical copy, we'll be fine.
Of course, it's going to be easier to just not buy the things in the first place :) I still don't have a DVD player, because of my initial disgust at the region coding thing.
This is what we attempted to do with the 'testing' distribution. We probably won't know if it worked until we see how quickly the next release is out.
At first I was cynically amused that none of the women on the front page of that site were topless -- obviously a case of American standards prevailing. But then I realized: of course... they're on page three.
Hey! Some of us are brunettes!